Posts Tagged «security»

A pair of researchers have identified the most potent security threats to self-driving cars and offered possible solutions. Basically, it might take a little longer than expected until you can take a nap on the way to work.

There’s a new and particularly clever piece of malware in town called WireLurker, and rather unusually it targets iOS and OS X. Even more remarkably, WireLurker is surprisingly virulent, possibly already infecting hundreds of thousands of iOS and OS X users. While OS X malware isn’t that rare, it’s almost unheard of for iOS to be susceptible to such attacks — and no, even if your device isn’t jailbroken, you can still be infected.

Over the last week, it has emerged that Verizon Wireless has been silently tracking around 100 million mobile customers using a supercookie that can’t be opted out of. The tracking cookie, as you can probably guess, allows Verizon to track almost everything that you do on the internet, and then sell that behavioral data to advertisers. Even worse, get this: Verizon’s implementation of the supercookie is so sloppy that any third party can also use the cookie to track your behavior.

Starting this week, you can use a smartphone app to open your room at some Aloft, Element and W hotels. Over the next few months, Starwood (which owns those three chains) will upgrade 150 of its hotels to allow keyless, smartphone entry to some 30,000 rooms worldwide. Did I mention that keyless entry also means you can skip the check-in desk and go straight to your room, too?

Google has released the details on a new SSL 3.0 bug, codenamed Poodle, that threatens all modern browsers with a man-in-the-middle attack — and the only solution is to disable the old handshake standard.

Back in July, we wrote about a massive security hole — BadUSB — that potentially gave hackers the ability to hijack or subvert billions of USB devices, from keyboards to printers to thumb drives. At the time, due to the severity of the issue, the researchers who discovered the flaw didn’t publish their BadUSB exploit code. Now, however, two other hackers have worked out how to exploit BadUSB — and they’ve published their code on Github for all to see.

There’s a new internet-crippling zero-vulnerability in town called Shellshock. It potentially affects around half of all websites on the internet (around 500 million), and millions or billions more internet-connected devices such as routers, smartphones. In simple terms, this means that it’s now relatively simple for anyone to gain unauthorized access to a large portion of the world’s computers.

Just about everybody wants encryption to move forward to one extent or another, but as one former Google researcher points out, truly large scale encryption would be the end of the internet as we know it.

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